Leaf Twig and Thorn Razor Review: A Sharp Single-Edge

It’s unsafe to person epiphanies portion shaving. But successful this lawsuit it was unavoidable: My epiphany was astir shaving.

For the past fewer weeks, my bath regular has been a small similar George Clooney successful O Brother, Where Art Thou?, minus the smelly Dapper Dan. I’ve been lathering shave soap with a brushwood and bowl, and shaving with an old-fashioned single-blade, single-edge, unmedicated information razor.

Specifically, I’m utilizing the Leaf Thorn—a stylish and well-marketed and self-avowedly “aggressive” single-edge razor whose location blades are truthful wafer-thin the institution imprints them with the words “I americium not plastic.” The little assertive Leaf Single Edge Razor is called the Twig, and it's meant to beryllium much gentle than the Thorn. It’s each precise cute.

But what I learned, aft weeks of baby-smooth shaves with the Thorn, is that I’ve been doing shaving wrong.

Stay Sharp

The epiphany was thing that seems evident astatine first: The champion and safest leaf is ever the crisp one. The best room weapon is the 1 you support sharp. The aforesaid goes for scissors, and for the blades you enactment connected your ain face. The Leaf’s low-tech, elemental single-blade was cutting arsenic intimately and good arsenic immoderate fancy cartridge leaf setup I’ve tried connected the market. The crushed was mostly that it was inactive sharp.

Because here’s the thing: It doesn’t substance if you’ve got a 15-layer stacked leaf cartridge with whistles, lights, and responsive AI. Dull blades are awful, and each blades get dull with use. And erstwhile blades get dull, they commencement to yank connected my hairsbreadth alternatively of cutting it, irritate my tegument into aggravation, and origin small nicks erstwhile the tegument pinches up. Alas, the modern cartridge-based shaving blades that predominate the supermarket are costly and often inconvenient to perpetually replace: astir $30 oregon $40 for a battalion of 10.

The terms adds up. Time mag knew this crippled already successful 1927: "As everyone knows, information razor manufacturers deduce the bulk of their profit, not from razors, but from the replaceable blades."' The aged concern schoolhouse yarn that King Camp Gillette devised a get-rich strategy to suffer wealth connected information razor handles to marque wealth connected the blades is a spot of a myth, but the concern logic of shaving remains inexorable: The money’s successful the blades.

So I defy swapping retired for excessively long. And past wage the price. Even arsenic Gillette and different razor makers advertise that their leaf cartridges are bully for weeks’ worthy of shaves, my ain coarse, evil, steel-clad stubble tends to devour done a cartridge a full batch sooner than I privation to regenerate it. So either I support paying leaf installments, oregon wage my taxation successful the signifier of a nary good, precise atrocious shave.

The Safety Dance

The Leaf offers an opposing mentation of shaving: The money’s successful the handle. The blades are alternatively cheap, small, and ubiquitous. The Thorn is astatine bosom an old-fashioned information razor. It’s compatible with beauteous overmuch immoderate bully old-fashioned information blade, whether the classical Astra Platinum (you’ll person to drawback the treble borderline successful half) oregon Leaf’s own blades. Packs of a 100 are little than a $20 bill.